


Sing Me the Phonebook

by glitterandrocketfuel



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jail, M/M, Other, Prison, liminal spaces, the kind of friendship/relationship that goes beyond words, weird gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 05:26:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18004679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterandrocketfuel/pseuds/glitterandrocketfuel
Summary: Liner Notes: Creation is sacred, and sacred things create sacred spaces--times out of time and places out of place, where reality succumbs to the gravitational influences of mythic archetype. Ordinary humans who tap into those creative slipstreams sometimes get pulled in and sometimes get pulled under, becoming the vehicles for the stories that demand to be played out and the pan-dimensional truths that refuse to be denied.Aside from that bullshit (or truth so deep it can't be directly looked at), this is a story about how the blues in Patrick's nature, the Soul in his Punk, caught him in a riptide that only the deepest of truths can pull him out of.





	Sing Me the Phonebook

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scarredsodeep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/gifts).



> For @shark-myths/scarredsodeep because this is a playground of mythic proportions and she swims those deep and mysterious waters like a goddamn mermaid. This was originally a birthday fic that had to sit for awhile.
> 
> You will want to be familiar with Patrick Stump performing "Sing Me the Phonebook" of which there are exactly two, each with a different set of lyrics (see end notes for links). When I first heard Patrick perform "Phonebook" at Foodstock (via youtube), I was struck by how stripped-down it was and yet how much emotion there was in the simple blues tune, and how much the lyrics sounded like something out of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" that I felt sure that it had to be a cover of some old folk song. When I found out it was something original and so rarely performed that it's almost as if it doesn't exist unless you're meant to find it, I had to start thinking about what would pull lyrics like that out of a sweet cinnamon-roll guy like Patrick. I ended up here.

It's 2010, and the band is semi-officially "on hiatus" and unofficially careening towards separation. Patrick still keeps in touch with Pete, but there's so much exhaustion and heartbreak that texts and phone calls are the good fences that make good band-neighbors. Patrick, still hurt and reeling from _Folie_ , finds refuge in solo music outside of pop-punk, and closer to his roots of soul and R&B.

It's in the unguarded meditation of "canoodling" (no, not  _ that  _ kind, for that wound is still fresh and raw) that he brushes up against the heartwood of the blues, that liminal space where music exists in its own pocket universe in mythic form, where its narrative gravity exerts influence on the reality of the space found there--Patrick finds himself in that pocket-universe and thinking of his father, of all people. His father, who is a folk musician, who spoke about that place only in the oblique, edging around it with his fellow musicians but never his son the musician, but Patrick was never a stupid kid when it came to music. 

He listened when the long-haired, soft-spoken, gentle-voiced musicians murmured about places like the Crossroads (not just any crossroads, no sirree, and everyone swears they won't trust the smile on the driver or accept the ride that comes for them, but sometimes they do), the Whisky ( _ that _ one, and yet very much  _ not  _ that one at all--mind you don't get lost or trip balls in the back hallway, lest you find a door that's not really a door), or the Yard (the rhymes may be more harshly-spoken word now than the rhythms of breaking rocks and digging ditches in the hard times of yesteryear, but the chained violence thrums the same). The fact that the elders would clam right up when he came into the room clued him in that these were important things by their absence--their negative space.

But young Patrick ended up filing those references away for later. He was caught up in pop-punk, where that liminal music-space buts up against reality in sweaty, low-ceilinged basements, bingo halls, and shitty dive clubs with sticky, beer-soaked floors and underage kids wearing wristbands and hand-stamps and sugar-rush energy. It's not the same as the Blues. Pop-punk and hardcore and softcore live in the Basement, and Patrick would never dream of bringing that up to anyone in the band, except maybe Andy, and definitely not Pete.

To get to the Crossroads, you have to be desperate. The Basement opens up for hormones and tear-smudged eyeliner.  But to end up in the Yard, the Time is for the Crime.

**

Pete is everywhere in the tabloids, making a mess of his life, his relationship, every stable thing he ever had a shaky grip on. It's in the middle of this that Patrick gets a late-night call--nothing too unusual in the span of their lives together, but something that's been coming more rarely, part of Pete's self-imposed penance for what he believed he was responsible for during their last go-round as a band. A not-so-merry go-round, and Patrick has been thinking about carousels and strange spaces ever since America's Suitehearts and fuck it if LA isn't one huge funhouse-mirror of a crack in the universe anyway.

There's soreness in his chest--in his heart and the frayed edges of his soul--when he hears Pete's voice because it's that ragged, thready desperation of Pete, begging forgiveness after Patrick's exploded. And it's the acid etching of guilt that always follows in the it's-not-you-it's-me, no-it-really-is-you dance that they fell into and can't stop. "Do you want me to come over?" At least in the dark, they still have this. No faces, no lights, no eyes, just a voice on the other end of the line, stripped down to the bare-bones cadence of human vocal cords and the faint hum of the electric current between them that has always been there.

"No--no, this is part of it." Pete sighs on the other end of the line. "When I said the world had enough Pete Wentz, well, you're part of the world, y'know."

This is part of the reason his hands curl as if they're wrapped around Pete's throat. That over-dramatic self-hate of Pete's that's just so goddamn in-your-face about how he should be  _ out  _ of your face. "Goddammit, Wentz, I'm your fucking best friend, aren't I?"

"Just--" Pete sighs again and Patrick can hear the pain in it, but his own pain is still an open wound. "Sing to me? I can't sleep, and I can't keep being a poltergeist in my own hea--house."

Patrick starts on "Lullabye" but Pete stops him. "No. Not any of that. It--"

"Hurts," Patrick finishes for him. He knows this hiatus is what they need--they're exhausted, strung-out, can't stop taking pot-shots at each other like circling dogs, nipping at each other's flanks because there's not enough space at either end of the leash. But Pete will always need him in times like this, and Patrick can't  _ not  _ rush to the rescue.

"Yeah. Sing me--anything. Anything meaningless. Sing me the phone book or something. I just need to hear your voice."

If this were happier times, Patrick would sing text messages or funny tweets from one of the aggregators. But it isn't happier times, so he sings the blues. Snippets of BB King, Aretha, older songs with origins on wax cylinders and rhythms of pickaxes striking rocks and ankle chains, of sweat and dirt and old tears and betrayal.

**

It wouldn't be the first time Pete's breathing deepened on the other end of the line, or that Patrick’s own voice faded in and out of that half-sleep, half-awake state where he couldn't tell if he were dreaming the notes he sang or not, but he finds himself in a different bed than the one he fell asleep in this night.

The springs creak. He can feel them through the thin mattress. There's something above him--another set of springs beneath another, identical mattress. Thin white light comes from somewhere distant, filtering down from somewhere beyond his feet in the vast, cavernous space that is Out There where he can hear the echoes of emptiness that is full of other people and the shadows from that weak, filtered light make stripes on the floor.

The bars, the echo of empty silence, the quiet creak of springs, are interrupted by the scuff of a shined regulation shoe and his guts turn to water as he hears a key in the lock, and a door made of bars slide back. The stripes on the floor melt into each other like an old time rotoscope and the shuffle of shoes enters the room. 

A cell.  _ The _ cell. This is a cell and he's in a prison but it's nothing like the ones they show on TV, reality or fictitious. His heart starts to race as the twin pairs of shoes stop at the bunks, but the hands don't reach for him. He can't move, can barely breathe as his cellmate on the top bunk, thus far nothing but the shift and creak of springs and quiet despair, is pulled down by harsh hands to the floor.

The man wears worn standard-issue pants, striped livid in black and white, but Patrick cannot unsee the tattoos, as familiar as the planes and curves of his own skin or perhaps even moreso. His arms are spread by the two guards, inked sleeves stretching in the cold moonlight, as they smash him face-first into the wall and force him to stand there. His cellmate turns his head and he can see the dark holes where his eye sockets are, the barest gleam of what he knows is whiskey gold beneath sooty lashes, shining out from long choppy bangs.

The guards waste no time with taunts. The crack of knuckles echoes through the empty air, followed by the dull, meaty slaps of body blows. Patrick tries to protest, he does. But his air can't make it past his throat and his legs are like leaden weights, pinning him down into the thin mattress so far that he feels every ounce of extra weight he thought he'd lost with his new workout regimen and the springs are digging into his back like burning brands.

His cellmate drops, succumbing to the beating, and his tormentors follow him down, each taking a knee in a parody of fealty and Patrick wishes he'd never turned his head and had it frozen in place to witness the beating because God help him, his cellmate catches his eye and Patrick can't help but be trapped in that pain-soaked gaze even as his familiar, temptation-ridden mouth--the same mouth he's heard, felt, countless times, punched more than once, kissed and cursed and bit, too--slackens in acceptance of the obscene sounds of skin on skin that should be the result of something sensual, consensual, pleasurable, hearts car-crashing against hearts, but instead are fists against ribs.

Patrick wishes his eyes could close because while he's trapped as witness to the flaying of Pete Wentz, his peripheral vision is too good  _ goddamnhiseyes  _ to miss that the guards administering the beating are all wearing Patrick's own face.

**

_ I'm in the Yard _ . 

Part of him accepts this, the same way it accepts that the sky above is bleached-out white because the rules are different, here. He could be grateful that it's not the Crossroads--there will be no deals cut here for ambition. But the Yard? He probably has his crimes.

His crimes are mostly named Pete Wentz.

Patrick shuffles around the yard when the bars are unlocked and the sun is high in the white sky. The press of chains on his ankles and the blank stares of the other lost souls propel him forward, but nothing keeps him locked in like his own thoughts. Pete is here with him, in a dozen different timelines wearing a dozen different hairstyles and expressions. 

All the prisoners are Petes. 

All the guards wear Patrick's face.

Pete sits next to him on the bench in the shade sometimes. "What are you doing here?" Patrick asks. "This is the Yard."  _ You don't blues _ , he wants to say, but maybe that's not so much the truth. Pete's blues are well-known performance art.

Pete stretches his arms out before him. "I got full sleeves," he says. "Deal the hand you're dealt."

One of the other lost souls passes them. "Steeping in your troubles?" he asks with a hollow-sounding voice.

Pete nods. "I got in all your sleep." he jerks his head towards Patrick but speaks to his counterpart. 

Patrick shakes his head. "I fell asleep singing to you. I woke up here."

"You're sleeping in my gutters." Pete gestures to himself, then Patrick. "Boy, you stepped in deep." His eyes grow intense, as if he's trying and hoping for Patrick to get some hidden message behind the cryptic words.

"I sang you the phone book." Somehow, Patrick knows this is significant. It's got the same feel as the Yard. The same desperation. Sing anything and everything because your supper depends on it--someone's life depends on it. 

It's the kind of singing that sometimes creeps up on a singer, when they become just another part of the microphone stand for something that's so much more powerful than a human body. Pete's words don't make sense, but they tell him everything in those places low in his gut where he can't articulate except maybe sometimes through music.  _ This is the Yard _ , he reminds himself.  _ The rules are different here _ .

The knot of prisoner-Petes has grown too thick, and the guards milling with almost as much lack of direction as the prisoners begin to edge closer to where Patrick sits with his cellmate. Pete rises abruptly, avoiding his eyes. The eyes of the guards, however, fix on Patrick's cellmate. Like snakes in the hot desert sun. "I gotta piss," Pete says. His steps are exaggerated as he makes his way to the wall.

Patrick is left alone, trying to make sense of the patterns made by the lost souls as they circle the yard, until the whistle blows and he queues up with the rest to return to their cells.  _ You get to the Yard because you're Doing Time _ . Sultry, plaintive melodies circle around in his head in time with the prisoners who are all Pete. Melodies looping around and around like concertina wire crowning the high fences, swinging around the towers at the four compass points where the guards wait with spotlights and high-powered rifles both aimed into the pit of fenced-in space with well-worn paths of self-flagellation. It's the only space where they can see the sky, and they still piss in the corners to keep it from getting too precious.

_ It's always like this _ , he thinks. Pete dusts the real with just enough filth, self-loathing, to keep himself in solitary. Covers his character in caricature so he can hide in plain sight and nothing ever need be real. Sleeping in the gutters of his mind, Wallowing in self-hate. Doing time for the crimes of his mind.

It's then that Patrick thinks he knows why he's here and what he has to do. What he's always done.

Pete's in the Yard. And Patrick's got to bust him out. 

**

"Why do they come at night?" He finally works up the courage to ask Pete after too many nights. Or perhaps they're just blinks of the eye--time doesn't work here, and he knows better than to mark it. Not in these liminal spaces and pocket universes, or Pete's head, where time shifts and loops back on itself like musical riffs and everything's just off the key of reason. The days haven't passed as normal days do--there are no times for eating, only the light shining on the yard and in the cell, while the time in between is dark  _ nothing _ , like flashes of an old-fashioned rotoscope.

"Circle the Yard," Pete says, as if that's all the answer Patrick needs. "Forty days' light, forty days' dark." He's making weak gestures, wincing as he lifts his arms in the circling motions that are supposed to convey...something. Patrick reaches up, placing his hand against Pete's shoulders, as if his tentative touches could ease the pain he knows Pete must feel from the guards wearing Patrick's face, who pull his arms up over his head every night for better access to his undefended ribs.

That doesn't make any sense, but in a way, Patrick understands it. It reminds him of years ago, of a Pete less stable (as if he's not such a hot mess right now), whose up and down cycles could last for weeks. Pete's in a prison, and Patrick has to pull him out. Pete's a mess, and Patrick's the clean-up crew.

Circle the Yard. Forty days light, forty days dark.

**

Patrick has been here forty days of dark and light, it feels. Forty days where the hot, bleached-out sky beats cruel sun down on them and he struggles with half-formed words to try to figure out why Pete locked himself in this place. Forty days of watching himself wearing the uniforms of authority and conformity and the execution of justice--and the justice of execution--while perverting it as his doppelgangers drag his cellmate-Pete from the upper bunk at night and the beatings begin.

He tried to stop them as they entered, the second or third night-cycle. He sat up, ready to confront with his gut churning sickeningly at the sight of his own face on a guard, twisted into something so ugly that Patrick's own shame streaked hot down his spine and he felt his balls literally shrivel up into his body. But he gathered shaking legs underneath him, ready to stand anyway, because that's what Patrick did.

But not that time. His cellmate-Pete slithered down from the top bunk and pressed a finger to Patrick's lips. He pushed Patrick down onto the bunk, held his shoulders down with gentle pressure and leaned in close enough to kiss and for a hot minute, Patrick was tempted to fall. "Don't give me no dirty look," Pete murmured against his lips and then he was gone, already facing the guards with his arms spread out and a smirk on his lips. 

Every time he tried to break the pattern, his cellmate-Pete interceded, descending from above. Patrick stopped trying after the third time. Pete pushed him back on the bunk and stroked his face with a look of limitless affection that couldn't fill the hollow darkness living underneath it. "You want more?"

For an insane minute, Patrick wants to scream YES! Because he's always wanted more from Pete. Wanted more Pete and wanted Pete to be More. Even when Pete was Too Much. He just wanted that extra Pete-ness to be his alone, to lock away when it was too much and pull out when it wasn't enough. And the thought pressed him down, because it was Pete who always seemed to wrap himself around Patrick, and this thought-stream makes Patrick feel like he should have been the vampire in that ridiculously expensive video, not Pete.

For his part, Pete leans into that unspoken yes and it's all Patrick can do to still himself from taking what's so clearly offered. He and Pete have hurt each other, crawled into each other before, but he's afraid of what it will do to Pete if Patrick gives in to this ever-present thrum while inside Pete's head and trying to rescue him at the same time. There are lines, and then there are  _ lines _ , and there are better ways they've mind-fucked each other.

**

Pete scans the Yard, at the lost-soul prisoners shuffling their exercise hour in an out-of-time-and-space purgatory while the guards wearing Patrick's own face prowl like packs of glaring predators. The only interruptions in the dry, dusty dance are when a guard spots something that looks like weakness in a prisoner. Then it's a shove. A hit. A looming threat of dominant body language that's sometimes the only thing necessary to put the prisoner back in line, head lowered and eyes downcast.

"Is this how you picture me?" He asks Pete. He's struggling for the words now. He spends their time going over and over the fights from the last tour, wondering what went wrong between them. "Am I your jailer?"

Pete shakes his head in the negative. "You've been forsaken." He motions to the guards giving the two of them measured looks through narrowed eyes. They're hesitant about approaching Patrick, though. They seem to know somehow that Patrick...doesn't belong. 

Although maybe he does. Each time he closes his eyes, he expects to wake up back in LA, but the same striped shadows and dusty sunlight have greeted him for a week. Along with the dull thumps of fists hitting flesh of his cellmate-Pete and the certainty that it's him who's doing the hitting. "It's a role you share with me," he says, starting to worry. He's speaking the language of the Yard more easily now. Cryptic, dreamlike, full of significance and metaphor-that-really-isn't and riddles wrapped in mysteries and deep-fried in enigmas, which means they're getting deeper. That  _ Pete  _ is getting deeper, and he's got to pull Pete out of it.

**

He can't stop the nightly beatings and he can't look away from the smaller abuses in the yard. So he eases. He cleans up after the messes. Wipes blood away from eyes, noses, lips that have whispered against his neck and swelled fat and bruised from some unserious altercation or stupid stunt that didn't stop the laughs from escaping them. No laughs come in the Yard. Only whispers he can't quite make out and grateful glances that shift to grim pain when the prisoner-Petes think he isn't looking. Patrick starts to wonder if he's somehow  _ causing  _ the troubles, like a foreign body invading Pete's psyche.

If he wants to break Pete out of prison, Patrick's got to get better at looking like he belongs in here with him.

** 

Patrick wonders if he's going to be here forever before a break in Pete's spiral opens up. He can't even talk to Pete when he's like this--every iteration of Pete speaks only in the riddles allowed by the Yard, and Patrick finds himself sinking even deeper into the flow. The language they use with each other becomes less coherent. More cryptophasic. Patrick hums under his breath in the yard and the shuffling prisoner-Petes move in intricate patterns around each other and him and it's almost soothing.

At night, the guards come, and he doesn't hum.

When the guards leave, Patrick lowers Pete gently to the ground, taking care to avoid the bleeding parts. There's a needle painstakingly carved from the bones of an unfortunate rat. Threads carefully picked from the regulation-issues from his turn in the laundry (which he doesn’t remember but he knows has happened), laid out on a stretch of toilet paper that's the closest they come to clean. "What happened to us?"

He threads the needle and, with shaking hands, punctures Pete's skin with it, stitching him back together with rough, clumsy X's that feel like they could come loose at any moment and leak the stuffing of Pete's insides all over the Yard. As if the Yard weren't already made up of their insides.

Pete sets his jaw, his eyes dark and smudged with so much eyeliner that when he closes them, Patrick is reminded of empty skull sockets. Beautifully wrecked, he thinks as Pete tilts his head to one side in lieu of a shrug. "She got knocked up by my knock-knock joke." He hisses as Patrick pours a thin stream of moonshine he'd traded the rest of the rat for over the stitching. The place is starting to feel more real to Patrick, and he's having trouble remembering that he's a musician and not an inmate in Cell Block P-Is-For-Pete.

Patrick tries not to remember the look on Pete's face when he first dropped the news of his impending--and unplanned--fatherhood. Shotgun weddings get you into The Yard. He tries harder not to remember the clench in his own gut. The betrayal. The terrifying sense that it was all crashing down, that Camelot was falling and eternal summer dying in bloody sunsets. "It knocked me on my ass." Patrick tears a strip of cloth from his pant leg and smooths it over Pete's bleeding wound.

Instead of forcing Pete back up into his bunk, Patrick settles him onto the thin mattress on the lower bunk and lies carefully beside him. Pete shivers in his arms and Patrick does the only thing he can do--he sings softly. Nothing happy. Nothing modern, because that concept--the notion of Los Angeles, of Chicago, of the world of livejournals and blog posts and text messages--feels more and more like a dream with every circle round the Yard. And Patrick is more afraid that he  _ isn't  _ afraid of the world fading around him. 

"What keeps you here?" he asks. 

"I'm just some scum," Pete-the-cellmate says to him. 

His tone is ineffably sad in the echoing darkness and Patrick fears that he's missed the significance. "No."

He feels Pete nod in a rebuke of his protest. "In the back of a pickup truck." Pete's next words make him think not of pickup trucks, but of vans with no air conditioning and miles and miles of getting lost in cornfields and along lonely highways--that other liminal space that all four of them inhabited at one time. Tour buses weren't the same. 

Patrick wonders why they never noticed what they'd lost in the midst of all they'd gained. In the darkening silence, Patrick wonders, one day when he's an oldster--provided he makes it that long--if he will speak in hushed tones about the Tour Van to other veteran musicians, who will nod knowingly and clam up in front of the kids.

"Why do you let them make you bleed?"

Pete's expression as he leans back is almost sublime the way he turns pain beautiful. That fucker always could wear misery like Dolce & Gabbana. He cracks one blackened eye open and the ghost of a smirk chases its way across his lips, as if he can read Patrick's thoughts. "Can't judge blood by the way it felt."

**

They're back in the Yard, skulking against the wall in the shade, and Patrick is sick of the brutalized faces of his best friend in all his best and worst iterations. The guards have had enough of a particularly obnoxious Pete--one whose antics are endlessly reprinted in the tabloids because the sneer is just so... _ deliciously hateable _ that even Patrick has scowled at it. The guards have backed him into a corner and Patrick can't decide if he's on his feet to go rescue Pete or join the guards because Pete  _ just won't stop _ . 

Patrick shakes off his cellmate and is halfway across the dusty yard before a pair of Petes intercepts him in that sideways way the prisoners tended to move when they group. One wears a set scowl from Pete's Arma days while the other one wears an expression that contracts Patrick's heart in a way everything else--even the beatings from cellmate-Pete--have failed. 

That, more than the hands that grasped his upper arms, stopped his forward motion. He stares into his best friend's eyes and years peels away beneath the black smudges and the smirk on a face more angular than his cellmate's. The features are the same--the hot-whiskey eyes, the smirk, the shape of the too-big mouth that held back the too-many teeth--but they come from dark alleys and bad ideas. The blackness doesn't come from eyeliner and the smirk is brittle glass over the darkest part of Pete, coming out to play.

This is the Pete that wants every stunt to be a one-way trip. Even he doesn't want the guards' attention on Patrick.

This is also the Pete who kisses him dangerously with twenty-thousand witnesses, and desperately in darkness and silence. This is the Pete that shakes apart underneath him and the Pete that rips all his protests and objections into moral incongruity that gives no fucks about anything past, present, or future, beyond the need to be so tangled up in each other's very molecules that nothing short of nuclear fission can separate them.

This is why they implode, every time.

Patrick lets himself be drawn into the circle dance of the yard while the prisoners are picked off and picked on, and his cellmate looks at him, then into the middle distance, beyond the fence where the desert seems to stretch into miles of nothing, but it's a free nothing.  _ Please, Pete _ , Patrick thinks.  _ See the way out _ . He's encouraged by Pete noticing there's something outside of the razor-wire boundaries of this place. But his cellmate turns away, meeting Patrick's eyes again while his addiction-Pete presses Patrick's body against the wall and Patrick can't help but crave it even if it isn't real.  _ The rules are different here _ .

Pete can stop the beatings if he just lets Patrick save him. The Yard, he knows, has a certain justice to it between the musical notes. You only do your time for your own crime. You can only get to The Basement of punk when your anger is honest, and you only go to The Yard for your  _ crimes _ , not for senseless pain. 

"I believe in something simple," he murmurs, but it's to himself and not Pete. The Yard is of your own making. You get there through your blues, and that's the same way you get back out again, like all those liminal spaces. Under your own power. It's simple, elegant.

And damn near impossible when you don't keep all of your soul in one place.

Every part of Pete is fighting him, tooth and nail, and Patrick's getting desperate.

**

Patrick should know that prison breaks happen best with the distractions of prison riots. He doesn't mean to start something, but his presence is clearly agitating the Petes. Every prisoner-Pete fights to keep him away from the guards and he's being smothered in Petes. What's worse is that none of them will listen to him and he can no longer find his words. He's so far into the Yard that all he's got left is riddles and pieces of lyric he must be picking up from this subconscious part of Pete's brain that also exists in its own universe.  _ Sing me the phone book. Forty days light, forty days dark. _

There's a Pete being harassed by a pair of guards, half-hidden in the long shadow of the north tower. There's a bubble of negative space around the tableau, and it's enough for Patrick to see that this Pete is one he's only ever seen in his own memories. He's wearing the same black and white striped vintage prison gear as all the other inmate-Petes and Patrick, but the collarbones are more pronounced. The eyes are more sunken. And Pete's skin--his beautiful, eternal-summer tan skin that's hot beaches and reckless beauty--is covered with an ashen pallor and Patrick can smell the antiseptic scent of hospital linoleum and the quiet beep of monitors. 

And Patrick's had enough.

That one doesn't belong in the Yard. The shadows and pain that lived in those eyes--he can almost hear the wind, sighing through the Joshua Tree, hear the creak of a swinging rope in the small noise behind the hollow quirk of lips.  _ Not that one _ , Patrick thinks, and it's almost strong enough to come out of his mouth in words. But in no 'verse is Pete allowed to punish himself for that. He made a teenage vow in a parking lot that it would never happen. Not while Patrick breathes. 

He lurches forward, and the move is so sudden, so different, so alien to the languid desperation that weighs down every movement in this place that there are no prisoners to intercept him as he charges the guards. He doesn't have a plan, he doesn't have elegance, he's no hero. He slams into himself-the-guard and the two of them fly backwards into the razor-wire topped fence. Current passes from the Patrick-guard into himself and it fucking hurts, but Patrick is over it. He's an electric head-butt to his own face and an explosion of pain and blood, bright-hot like the shock of an electric chair and the Yard is in chaos.

**

Pete stares up at him wearing as much Patrick's blood as his own. "Why?" He's staring at Patrick as if he's just come down off the Cross and not simply head-butted himself in the face. And bounced into an electrified fence. "Why are you saving me?"

Patrick shakes his head, sprawled on his back while every limb tingles painfully. All around him, the guards are going mad. Raging as they attack everything that moves in the yard--prisoner-Petes, shadows, each other. The Yard is collapsing and sirens are blaring and there's a prison riot going on and he can't move to smuggle Pete out in the chaos.

"You have to stop. Stop saving me." 

Patrick shakes his head. He tries to tell Pete that he will never stop saving him. Never  _ not  _ slip through the cracks in the universe or Pete's head to find him and pull him back out, but the words don't come. Only the cryptic language of the Yard seeps out from between the lips. "I believe in something simple." He gestures to the fences and his motions are frantic. Now that Pete seems to be seeing him--really seeing him--he can't get the words to come out. Pete was always better at the words, anyway.

His eyes flick towards the sparking gap in the broken fence. He gestures towards the opening.  _ Go now _ , he tries to say with his eyes, but again, no sound comes out but for the crypto-phasic nonsense. "Leave this town this evening!" At least it comes close to conveying what he means.  _ Get out of this prison, Pete. You don't belong here _ .

Pete nods slowly. "That's right, Patrick."

"The devil may be waiting." All Patrick can do is grab Pete's shirt and try to tell him around and in between the cryptic words. with his eyes, his hands as they cup Pete's face. "He may be a good friend of mine, for a long time." He staggers to his feet and pulls Pete up with him. Pushes Pete towards the hole that’s opened up in the fencing where he shoved himself the guard and makes to turn back to where the Yard is filling up with hatefaced Patricks, ready to quell the riot.

Alarms are blaring. The towers at the four corners illuminate harsh white light in the sudden blackness and he stands trapped in their beams. Spotlights shining on him as the crowd hoots and boos.  _ This is it _ , he thinks.  _ This is where they finally notice that I wear the face of the guards and not the prisoners. I don't belong here and Pete's head is going to boot me out ass first _ . Patrick cannot let that happen. He needs to save Pete from himself.

“Listen to me, please!” Cellmate-Pete's face crumples. "This isn't my Yard, Patrick." He lifts his eyes to the towers above, blinking back tears. "It's yours."

Overhead, the sky shatters.

Patrick lowers his head and tries to blend in and shrink himself and take the shelter Pete always offers at whatever cost to himself because Patrick will be there to clean him up and dress his wounds. It hasn't yet sunk in, the meaning of Pete's words. He's still certain that this is Pete's Yard, where he flays himself alive in a circus-freak sideshow act because he hates that he needs the attention. Because there he is again, cellmate-Pete, looking haggard and bloody and stupid-tired exhausted as he steps into the spotlights from the towers, shoving Patrick out of the bright, burning beams. 

"Come on!" He lifts his arms up as if to work the crowd.  _ Go ahead and hate me and I'll fucking spit on you because I welcome your hate _ .

Patrick can't speak. He can't tell Pete to stop it as the guards close in. This time two dozen Patricks, wearing determined, cold, enraged expressions.

But the Pete from 2005, who covered himself in eyeliner and twisted lips and hummed Hallelujah in a parking lot is the one who stops him. Grabs him with rough hands and turns him around and pushes him out into the spotlight to face his cellmate-Pete again. Behind him, Pete-at-the-end-of-his-rope holds his upper arms in a grip that could almost be as cruel as the guards'.

Before him, cellmate-Pete, oozing blood from between his clumsy stitches, drops to his knees. "Please, Patrick. Stop. Saving. Me." He reaches up and Patrick can't help but collapse in front of him. Letting him, for once, cradle Patrick's head and burrow his fingers into Patrick's scalp instead of the other way around. "Break. Us. Out."

It's then that Patrick gets it. This is  _ not  _ Pete's Yard, where Pete pays for his crimes.  _ Patrick  _ has been the only prisoner all along. Trapped in his own cell block with all the ghosts of his best friend he's been rescuing, but never setting free. 

Because the Yard is Doing Time. And he's been Doing Time for centuries, it feels like. Circling the Yard of this savior/damned-thing dynamic that the two of them seem to be tidally-locked into, where  _ I will always be there to save you _ is as much of a threat as it is a promise.

But you don't get to the Yard for anyone else's crime. You do the time because the crime is no one else's but  _ yours _ .

He has to let go. Stop being Pete's rescuer so that he can also stop being Pete's tormentor. 

All this time, Pete's had him convinced that it was Patrick who needed to be free of Pete. Now he sees that he needs to set Pete free just as much.

"'m not a Messiah," he says. He's fully under the cryptophasic curse of the Yard now, but the Petes that surround him all stare back at him through golden, burning eyes. If Patrick is Pete's savior, then he's also stuck having to put him through hell. "Just a mess." He flings himself straight into the snarl of the concertina wire and the entire fence sparks and snaps in on his body like it's been sprung. Wind rushes in, his body is electrified, and the spotlights all explode.

**

He's back in his own bed. It feels like forever already passed but the mattress feels like a gift from a benevolent god. He never knew he cared so much about thread-count. Only the rest of the night has passed. His phone is there, on the pillow next to him, still possessing about a quarter of its charge after the call disconnected on its own sometime after ninety minutes of connection time, his log tells him.

In the morning light, the Yard feels like a fever-dream. Too much adrenaline, not enough sleep, a contact-high. But some slice of Patrick knows that it was real. He feels a...a  _ severance _ . His heart aches, bone-deep in a way that it's never hurt before and hopefully never will again. While he's still feverish, he scribbles the fragments he can remember into a little black hipster day-planner which is the only thing he can find on short notice. He records a beat on his phone that is only his hands, thumping against the desk in the corner of his room and his own out-of-breath humming of the beginnings of a seed of melody. Thin, but present.

He tucks it away, just like the elders zipped up at his presence when he was young, and the Yard fades into his subconscious, only coming out in unconscious ways as he's working on some stuff for his solo debut. He's been playing the blues a lot. Canoodling soulful, funky, intricate melodies in the lower registers, paired with bright, high, heavy-synth electronica. 

One low night when the air feels strange, the fever-dream of the Yard comes back to him and he finally puts it to music. It comes out so different from the angry-at-your-girlfriend, superstar-pop of the band that he only plays it live twice, once for a local charity event almost nobody will see. It's stripped-down--very much un-Patrick--just chords and the stomp of his own foot. He should be playing it on a shoebox strung with gut and playing it in an air conditioned venue feels like a luxury that dulls it.

It's an uncomfortable song, he can sense it in the audience, who still expect something from the boys who made silly videos about nerds at high school dances or played practical jokes on each other and other boys who wore skinny jeans and eyeliner. It's not a quirky, smirky song; it's a song of pain and despair and they don't know how to clap for something so raw.

**

Pete calls at first. Then Pete texts. Then Pete fades. Pete fades from the tabloids after the implosion of his marriage. Patrick goes on tour, dragging the music he makes through small venues that feel like going home, only you can't go home again, because he's no longer the shy, fluffy kid with the bad haircut, stupid hats, and ridiculous sideburns. He leaves his hats at home. Dresses to impress. Stands at the microphone and asks himself WWPWD and then does it.

It's not Pete, though, and the response from the audiences is a little mixed. Patrick realizes he isn't Pete and tries to be more Patrick, but he isn't that, either. He has to learn to be Patrick who doesn't save Pete all the damn time and it's hard. He misses his other half. 

The music he makes is for himself, because nobody else seems to care, and it hurts. 

The night he writes words out into the ether--being Pete again, because in the quiet hours when he's only pretending to be absorbed in work in his basement studio, he's drowning and the only other person he knows who knows how to drown is Pete--he plays the song again, just him and the guitar and the liminal space of the studio becoming a purgatory of its own (no hips involved, though).

She's not around when the call comes. He loves her, and she loves him, but she has her own life and it takes her elsewhere sometimes. She left him a note on the fridge, though.  _ Call him _ . (This is why he loves her. She knows that he comes as part of a package deal. The details, they will work out as they go).

He's afraid to go to sleep that night. The liminal spaces feel so very close.

The call comes.

He takes it.

Pete's voice is there, on the other end of the line. There are words--not fighting words, but softer ones. Wise ones. Patrick remembers he is  _ twenty-seven _ , and what that means for musicians. He almost slips into liminal space again, but Pete's voice is there, tethering him in the darkness. He's heart-sore and exhausted, and this time it's him with the weird midnight request. "Read me your lyrics." And he drifts in and out to Pete's voice, reading to him about collapsing stars, spinning planets, fireworks, saints and choking angels.

**

Patrick wakes up in his own bed, but not.

His phone is there, on the pillow next to him, and there's a body in the bed with him. A scent so familiar he forgets its presence and only notices it through its absence.

In the glow of the streetlamp streaming in from the window he doesn't remember opening, his eyes meet Pete's.

Their legs are tangled together and the rushing in his veins is like an ocean that surrounds them and when he blinks, he can see that it's not an ocean of water, but of stars.

He's back in liminal space again. Pete is here with him.

"I heard you sing about it," Pete murmurs.

"You broke me out," Patrick replies. It's somehow amazing that he realizes that the Yard was real. And freakishly obvious that Pete had followed him into the Yard.

Pete's eyes gleam in the dark, the way they once did in a shitty van with Midwestern highways stretching out beneath bald tires. Yet another shared universe between them. "I owed you one. Million. For all the times you broke me out."

"I'm sorry." Patrick can only choke out the words. "I put you through--" He wants to tell Pete so much--the guilt he feels about the parts he's played in Pete's ups and downs. That night on the Soul Punk tour where he realized just how much it costs a person to play the role of Pete Wentz and lay himself out there for the world to love-hate. How much he'd been protecting Patrick and how much it must have cost him. How much he owes Pete. How much he needs Pete to see this new, fresh scar on his soul and beg,  _ Can you love me with this mark of Cain? _

But the gleam in Pete's eyes says he already knows. Patrick's soul turns itself inside out with the shaking realization that Pete's always known him. In here, the shared space out of time and place where their skeletons are twins, Pete's  _ always  _ known. Maybe more than Patrick himself.

"Sing me the phone book?"

Patrick sings him the phone book and tells him the truth. 

"I still love you. Want it all."

**Author's Note:**

> I used and remixed the lyrics from both versions of Phonebook (one was clearly meant to be for a more general audience). Comments and kudos feed my eldritch horrors and pay the coin to ferry us back and forth between all these mythic, liminal spaces we inhabit through telling these stories.
> 
> Patrick performing at Foodstock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCkCqAsaaoI  
> Patrick performing at SXSW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMdmvI3Cv00


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